Ján Hanes

“And there we simply dug everything. Earthclosets, holes, we masked it, so that no one could see us, we waited and guarded. Ourselves. And I know that some Pole used to walk around, so I assumed we had to be close to the Polish borders, or even in Poland already, because whatever we cooked, he would take from the leftovers, from sewage. There really had to be poverty, because from what we threw away, he tried to choose meat and took it away. I only knew, people used to talk about uneasy life because of some Solidarity party being there. But we only heard that. Why? Until now I don´t even know, why we actually were there.”

“We didn´t have the live ammunition with us, but we packed it. It was all loaded in wooden boxes, in one V3S truck that was being guarded night and day. There were automats with ball cartridges. So we kind of made up our minds the war was about to begin. In Poland, there is a sea, so the Americans could have come. There were various speculations. Added to that, there was great threatening with penalties because of offenses. Everything had to be obeyed to 100%. Watch closely so that no one walked through. We were simply afraid. We didn´t know, what´s going to happen. Before this, we only used to shoot at the firing range.”